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also on this floor : john's not mad : correspondance
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Well. Here we are. There you are. It's 2015, as I write this. This page was first written in 1998. What a difference seventeen years makes! You look great, by the way. The wrinkles add a meaty texture to your face, and you've really grown into that cardigan. It doesn't look like an affectation, these days. You just look comfy in that chunky knit.

Why are you here, by the way? Are you nostalgic for the time when children responded to a children's TV show about cerebral palsy, in a way that wasn't as sympathetic as the BBC had hoped? Perhaps you're younger than that, and are simply nostalgic for the time when a grown adult (me, hello!) responded to that nostalgia by being even crueller, on the internet.

Cruelty! It's funny, isn't it? Seeing someone else act out your most savage and repressed thoughts - it's really exciting. So exciting, that it makes you want to rail against political correctness. Why shouldn't you say what you want? Who are these idiots taking offence, because of the meaning of the words coming out of your mouth? YOU know you're not evil. So you set up an anonymous message board where you can say what you damn well like, and hound people you disagree with out of their homes, because FUCK THEM for telling you you can't call people faggots. Faggots is a word thats constantly on the tip of your tongue. Not saying it would require you to actively CENSOR yourself. And that's what BITCHES do.

I get that, I really do. It's despicable, but it's human. It's why I listen to the Distorted View podcast. Listen to that podcast, by the way. It's a great way to condense your evil into a disgusting half-hour of the day, before resuming treating the people around you with a subtle parody of respect.

Anyway, this page began when there was no other information on the web about Joey. When Yahoo was the Argos of the internet, and we weren't shouting OK GOOGLE FUCKING NO WAIT OK GOOGLE at our wristwatches. The cruelty was intended to be the deliciously tangy sauce, slathered on a slim banana of information - having not experience the reaction to Joey the first time around, I was discovering the joy of responding inappropriately myself. Was it OK? No. Did it give a lot of otherwise decent people pleasure? Inexplicably, yes.

Now, there's information everywhere. Joey has a Wikipedia page. My website, The Law of the Playground, was turned into a book and a TV show, in which actual celebrities pretended to remember him. My banana is redundant, and the sauce is sickly and nauseating without it.

I can't bring myself to wish I'd never created this page - although I'm open to the idea that I'd be a better person if I could. But this gleefully savage voice, punching down with such pleasure, is alien to me today. Maybe it'll become more alien to you. Maybe not. Perhaps you're a complete bastard, in which case I'd probably have casual sex with you.

I'm slow to take this page down, because I want to hold my own repulsive feet into the fire, and don't want to come across like a preachy dick who's erasing his past to look more decent than he is. However, maybe you'd like to visit the excellent charity, Special Effect. They help people with physical disability enjoy video games - something that's nowhere near as trivial as it sounds. It's genuinely life-improving stuff. So if you're going to be the bad guy with me and laugh at this, at least balance it out with a donation to some good fuckers who spend their entire days doing the right thing.

Good day to you.

I SAID GOOD DAY